Vehicle Accidents

We’re all aware of the dangers of driving a car. Traveling at speeds above 50 miles per hour in vehicles weighing over a thousand pounds creates an inherently dangerous situation. Add to this the fact that so many people drive, it’s surprising that more car accidents don’t happen, every day.

That’s not to say that there aren’t many car accidents. There are still entirely too many. In the state of Texas alone, a reportable car crash happened every 66 seconds, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. These crashes led to 237,941 injuries over the course of 2014, as well as 3,534 fatalities. Tragically, there was not a single day that someone didn’t die in an accident on a Texas roadway.

Nevertheless, driving is such an integral part of our lives in the U.S., and in Texas in particular, that there’s not much of an alternative to getting behind the wheel in order to get from one place, to another. Driving a car or truck, for nearly everyone, is just a part of our lives. While most of us use safe driving techniques, unfortunately, there are others that don’t take driving so seriously. By texting, speeding, or driving either recklessly, drunk, or both, they put you and others on the road at risk.

Sometimes, no matter how careful you are on the road, the acts or the negligence of other drivers can put you at risk, and lead to a car accident.

Common Car Accident Injuries

Car accidents come in a variety of shapes and sizes. There are minor fender-benders and high-speed, head-on collisions. Even the direction and location of the collision plays a huge part in the kinds of injuries that you could experience – getting “T-boned” from the side results in different injuries than getting hit from behind. Nearly every accident is different. However, no matter how small the crash is, there’s potential for a serious injury that can be debilitating for months or even years afterwards. Common injuries which can occur due to a car accident can include:

Whiplash

Getting jostled around unexpectedly – something that happens in nearly all car accidents, no matter how large or small – puts lots of strain on the muscles in your core, back, and neck. This strain can result in whiplash, which is the most common car accident injury. Just because it’s the most common injury, however, doesn’t mean it’s a minor problem. While whiplash might feel like simple soreness right after the crash, the pain and debilitation can grow and grow over the following days, and can lead to permanent disability if left unchecked.

Spinal Cord Damage

While strain on the muscles of your neck and torso leads to potentially debilitating whiplash, things can get even worse if a collision has a similar effect on your spine. Compression fractures, as well as herniated or bulging discs, can lead to permanent disability, nerve damage, and even can even leave you paralyzed.

Head Injuries

Even a small bumper-scraper can come with enough of an impact to make your head jerk around, especially if you weren’t expecting the collision. Even if you were lucky enough to make it through the impact without having your skull hit anything, your brain might be a different story. Whenever your head jolts in one direction, your brain can jostle around inside your head and come into contact with the inside of your skull, leading to a concussion. To make matters worse, the size of the impact is a poor indicator of whether you have a concussion, or how serious it is, and the effects of a concussion often don’t show themselves until hours or even days after the accident.

Impact injuries, like broken bones and lacerations

While some injuries sustained in a car accident can take awhile to show themselves, others are apparent immediately. If the car accident included a powerful impact – common in high-speed crashes – chances of a blunt trauma injury or a severe laceration grow exponentially. These can put you at great risk in the moments following the accident, and can leave you disfigured or even dismembered after the accident.

Compensation for Your Injuries

If you’ve had the terrible misfortune to get hurt by someone else in a car accident, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be made whole again. Oftentimes, the only way for this to happen is by getting the people responsible for the crash to pay your medical bills, and try to reimburse you for any pain, suffering, and future disability that you experience.

Unfortunately, the insurance companies that are there to make sure this happens rarely follow through. Once it becomes time for them to pay money out to people who were hurt, they become incredibly stingy. In the immediate aftermath of a serious accident that left you injured, you’ll often be contact by an insurance representative, who will try to make an offer to cover some of your expenses, if you agree not to file a lawsuit.

This offer to settle will almost never cover all of the medical expenses that you’ve accumulated already, and doesn’t account for any doctor’s bills that you may owe in the future. It also won’t cover lost wages or earning potential that you might have lost, as a result of the injuries that you sustained in the accident. While insurance companies will claim that it will be the best offer you’ll get, it doesn’t come close to compensating you for your injuries.

The attorneys at Dreyer & Mazaheri will fight to obtain an equitable compensation for you. We’ve built a strong reputation representing people terribly injured in car accidents, making sure that those responsible pay you what you need, in order to get through the difficulties that they’re making you go through. If you’ve been hurt in an accident, or lost a loved one in a horrific crash, call our law office at (210) 239-9420.